After spending weeks complaining that the proliferation of “fake news” led to Hillary Clinton’s electoral demise, progressives are now openly using fake news to self-soothe.

Newsweek, which gained notoriety in the 1990s as a news weekly you could find on dentist office waiting room tables below Highlights and Zoobooks magazines, took the extraordinary step this week of publishing President Hillary Clinton fan fiction.

In a piece entitled “Dispatches From The Alternate Universe Where Hillary Clinton Won,” Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld compiles excerpts from pre-written news stories anticipating the former secretary of State’s victory.

It’s apparently common practice for publications to have a vault of stories that forecast election results, Schonfeld writes. Preparing content before a major event makes sense to a degree, as newspapers often prepare obituaries for public figures long before they die. What doesn’t make any sense, however, is to publish a month later pre-written content that forecasted the election night incorrectly.

What’s perhaps the most telling part is this odd trigger warning from Schonfeld: “If you’re one of the 64,658,130 people who voted for Clinton (a popular vote total that significantly exceeds the president-elect’s), this might be wrenching to read.”

It’s clear these “dispatches” aren’t part of an effort to be more transparent with the American electorate, whose trust the media stomped on to virtue-signal obnoxiously. Its purpose is to serve as a balm for those still licking their wounds after Clinton’s defeat — and that’s what makes this collection of stories all the more troubling. The media are literally using their stories that falsely predicted the election to soothe themselves after things didn’t turn out the way they’d hoped.

Check out this entry from Jonathan Chait:

Sparing the Republic from the whims of a twisted maniac is no small triumph. Clinton’s skeptics have already been denying credit for her expected victory by noting that she benefited from facing the least popular major party nominee in history, and that a normal Republican could have defeated her. This misses the extraordinary nature of the opposition that produced this unpopularity in the first place. Clinton has absorbed 25 years of relentless and frequently crazed hate directed at her husband, compounded by her status as a feminist symbol, which made her the subject of additional loathing. Her very real missteps were compounded by a press corps that treated her guilt as an unexamined background assumption. She is almost certainly the first president to survive simultaneous leak-attacks by both a faction of rogue right-wing FBI agents and Russian intelligence.

It’s hilarious to read that Chait thought the media, the same people who asked Clinton effusive questions while an FBI investigation loomed over her head, were too hard on her. Most people do think Hillary Clinton is a dishonest, shady character who has skirted the law for decades. Holding Clinton accountable for her actions isn’t some crazy approach that’s completely out of left field like Chait intimates. If anything, the kid-glove treatment Clinton got embittered many against the media.

From Glamour’s Cady Drell:

Women like Clinton, and the women who led the fights for racial equality in this country, and the suffragettes before them, and the countless women whose names we don’t even know before them endured what they did so that things would be a little bit easier for the women who followed them. We don’t celebrate the election of a woman tonight for our own sakes, but because we recognize that the fact of her election means it will be a little less shocking, a little less unlikely, the next time a woman is elected president. Maybe it will be one of you.

Gross. Get a room!

While these pieces were at one point not satire, Schonfeld’s treatment of them — as cherished relics from a better time when there was hope for a Clinton presidency — reveals just how biased and hypocritical the media really is. No wonder Americans hate the media more than they do Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, because they’re openly mourning a candidate’s loss by re-reading their old baloney to suppress their shoulder-heaving sobs.